Program Manager - Special Projects

About the role

We are currently seeking an experienced Program Manager to join us at our Sun Prairie Innovation Center! The employee will be responsible for leading large-scale, cross-functional strategic initiatives that are critical to achieving corporate objectives. This role partners with senior leadership to drive initiatives that may span engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, IT, finance, sales, marketing, and human resources. This individual will also serve as the central point of coordination, ensuring alignment across stakeholders, managing complex dependencies, facilitating executive decision-making, mitigating risks, and delivering business outcomes on time and within scope while utilizing the tools and processes supported by the Project Management department.

Responsibilities

• Lead enterprise-wide projects from initiation through implementation and benefit realization.
• Translate executive objectives into actionable plans and measurable outcomes.
• Develop project charters, schedules, governance structures and communication plans right sized to the complexity of each initiative.
• Coordinate activities and interdependencies across multiple departments, business units or companies.
• Drive and document decisions, resolve conflicts and remove barriers that could impact project success.
• Prepare executive-level presentations, status reports and decision materials.
• Provide data driven recommendations to support informed decision making.
• Escalate risks and issues requiring executive intervention.
• Develop integrated project schedules and milestone plans.
• Establish project KPI’s and reporting mechanisms.
• Monitor project scope, schedule, budget, risks and resources.
• Implement corrective actions when projects deviate from approved plans.
• Ensure accountability for commitments across participating teams.
• Identify project risks, dependencies, assumptions and constraints.
• Develop mitigation strategies and contingency plans.
• Maintain risk and issue logs and drive timely resolution.
• Anticipate organizational impacts and proactively address challenges.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Engineering, Operations Management, Project Management or a related field
• 10+ years of project management experience, including leading projects with complex cross-functional teams

Qualifications

• PMI-PMP or equivalent experience
• Demonstrated success leading large-scale, cross-functional initiatives
• Experience working directly with executive leadership teams
• Experience managing strategic business initiatives
• Proven ability to influence without direct authority

Skills

• Excellent written and verbal communication
• Professional social skills
• Organizational and project planning skills